How to Turn Your Employees Into Brand Advocates on LinkedIn

LinkedIn isn’t just a virtual resume platform anymore. What started its life as a place to update your current job position and maybe add a few connections from the recent conference you attended has now become a mecca for the professional world. In fact, of LinkedIn users who frequently engage on the platform, 40% access it on a daily basis, clocking over 1 billion interactions each month.

It goes without saying that if you’re not active on LinkedIn, you’re falling behind.

The Why

Even more so, getting your employees engaged on the channel will do numbers for your company clout and sales, especially in a B2B space.

Don’t believe me? B2B marketers report that 80% of their social media leads come from LinkedIn, with 40% seeing LinkedIn as their most effective channel for driving high-quality leads.

HubSpot found that LinkedIn is 277% more effective at generating leads than Facebook and Twitter. Simply put, your salespeople need to be leveraging LinkedIn.

So, how do you get started turning your employees into brand advocates on LinkedIn?

We’ve got you covered.

The How

Update Profiles

For employees who are relatively unfamiliar with the platform, or have seen their page collecting dust, it’s important to ease them into using LinkedIn as a brand and sales driver. Start small with profile updates:

• Make sure they have a professional headshot as their profile picture (i.e., no pictures from cousin Pete’s wedding with Aunt Carol’s face half cut-off on the side).
• Ensure their job position and description is updated.
• Add a catchy, succinct “elevator pitch” describing themselves to the About section of their profile.
• Feeling extra? Add an appropriate profile cover photo. We recommend either a company-branded background image or something generic (like their city skyline).

Start Posting

Sharing a steady cadence of LinkedIn posts ensures employees’ pages are active and helps them elicit meaningful conversations on the platform. They can start by sharing company posts on their own pages by hitting the Share button at the bottom of posts. We always recommend they include a caption of their own to accompany the shared post, but start small by offering suggested language for them to use.

Once they’re comfortable sharing company posts, they should start dabbling in sharing industry news, articles and other employees’ posts with their own insight attached.

The more they comment and engage, the more likely they are to show up in the newsfeed’s algorithms, and the more likely they are to be seen as brand and industry advocates with insightful knowledge to share.

Join Groups

LinkedIn groups are a great way to meet and interact with likeminded industry folk. Many of these groups are private, which keeps the conversations more directed and specific to the topic or industry.

When accepted into a relevant group (all it requires is hitting the “Request to Join” button at the top of the group’s page), your employees will be welcomed into the community and can start engaging with topics posted. If they’re feeling really confident, have them start posting questions and compelling topics of their own.

Once employees start using LinkedIn regularly, the rest, as they say, is history. The platform has become a widely leveraged resource for professional conversations, recruitment and sales conversions. Help your employees get started using the tips above.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series where we dive into how to best use LinkedIn to drive sales.